Tag: violence

Real-world fighting isn’t a lot of fun. It’s nasty, brutal, and the anything-goes nature of a fight means people can get hurt. Badly.

Yet, let’s be honest for a second. Learning to fight can be a blast. Especially if you’re a history buff and are learning a historical method of fighting.

However, the question I’ve asked and seen asked more than almost any other is whether or not any of this is practical for the real world.

I took a look at that question myself a while back, as an outsider to the world of Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) and offered my take. Over a brief time, I’ve started modifying some of my thinking a bit, but I’m fairly well settled on the validity of pugilism as a valid style of fighting for both HEMA uses and application on the streets.

There are a lot of people in this world who have had to deal with bullying. I won’t speculate as to which ways of dealing with it are more positive and which ones aren’t. I’m not remotely qualified to do so.

However, I came across a story earlier about an Australian study that looked at how martial arts training was beneficial to the victims of bullying. That got my gear turning just a bit.

I mean, I’m someone who looks at the world on a daily basis. I take in all the insanity and try to boil it down for human consumption. My entire job revolves around comprehending what is taking place at a given moment and to try to figure out just why that is.

The problem, though, is that I look at a glimpse of the world and can figure it out from there, but our world is broken. Horribly, horribly broken.

As I’m sure you’re aware, we had a jackass sending bombs to people he disagreed with politically. Then yesterday, we had a jackass talk into a synagogue and start shooting people simply because they were Jewish.

This comes after months and months of low-level violence in the form of riots and assaults against people because they supported a certain politician and just a year and a half or so ago when a man tried to exterminate members of Congress for being part of the wrong party.

We are living in interesting times, in the Chinese curse sense.

And honestly, no one is ready for this. None of us are. You don’t get “ready” for stuff like this. Not completely.

What we’re looking at is little more than the start of an internal civil war. If something doesn’t give, we’re going to watch our nation torn apart, so it’s time to dig in and get as ready for this kind of thing as possible.

Whenever someone gets worked up about their personal safety, the first thing they do is arm themselves. Frankly, this isn’t a bad thing since firearms are one of those things that if you need, nothing else will replace.

However, most of those folks tend to just go to the range every so often, pop off a few rounds, and then call it a day. While I’ve already noted that’s not the best way to do things, it’s simply what I see from most gun owners.

But here’s the important thing, something I’ve noticed through my work, and that whether it’s about the weapon or the warrior…and I’m not just talking about violent encounters, either, but life in general.

Yesterday, I saw something that was pretty damn upsetting. It was an assault that took place at a Canadian gym.

Now, normally, I don’t pay that much attention to what happens up in Canada. I don’t like it when non-Americans interject their opinions on American topics, so I try to return the favor.

That said, Canada and the United States are pretty close to one another in a cultural sense, so this video shows an adult assaulting a teen lifter doing deadlifts, then being kicked out by the attacker who doesn’t appear to be a staff member of the gym. (Langauge warning)

I’m talking about the average, ordinary, everyday folks you see on your way to work, at the grocery store, or wherever they might be, but who are more than capable of taking bad people down a peg or two.

We need more folks like that. Desperately.

Over the last few months, our news cycle has seemingly been dominated by one topic other than Donald Trump. That topic? School shootings.

Many have postulated that the prevalence of guns in this country is somehow responsible for a perceived increase in mass shootings and that we need to ban certain kinds of guns because some mass shooters need them.

However, the problem isn’t guns. Bad people can use any number of tools to create havoc in our streets and in our hearts. Oklahoma City used fertilizer and fuel oil. A terrorist in New York used a Home Depot rental truck. Some tosser in Toronto used a van to kill people because he couldn’t get laid.

In other words, bad people will use whatever they can to do bad things. Banning guns isn’t an answer.

Pro-gun proponents will often say that what we need are more guns. The sentiment is right but expressed poorly. After all, we now have enough guns in civilian hands to arm every man, woman, and child in this country. If there was a certain saturation point of guns that would stop these kinds of things, we’d have already hit that point.

The answer isn’t more or fewer guns–though I am not about to advocate a violation of our Second Amendment rights because we supposedly have “enough” guns. There’s no such thing–but that we need more people with the willingness, training, and warrior mindset to go along with those tools.

In other words, we need citizens with the means, skill, and opportunity to intervene in many of these situations and put down these rabid animals.

However, everywhere we turn, we see people opposing this idea. Why? Well, they’d tell you that they don’t like guns and don’t think “weapons of war” belong on our streets, but they’re lying to you.

You see, for most people, the warrior is terrifying. These are people who have the tools, training, and psychological makeup that closely mimic the people the warriors are protecting the masses against.

In the old metaphor of the sheepdog–you know the one. Where the people are “sheep,” and the bad guys are “wolves” and the only way people can be protected are the “sheepdogs?” That one–there a comment I’ve read along with it about how the sheep fear the sheepdog because the sheepdog looks uncomfortably close to the wolf.

It’s true.

People are often uncomfortable with those who have embraced any aspect of the warrior life. They accept it in military and law enforcement personnel, in part because these are trappings they understand. They see the uniform and can feel an expectation that these warriors won’t turn against them. At least to some extent, anyway.

But for the regular folks, they get uncomfortable. They get afraid.

Years ago, a group that my wife and I socialized with asked me to no longer attend. I wasn’t an asshole to anyone. I didn’t get drunk and wreck the place. I didn’t do any of that.

No, I was asked to not stick around because I scared them.

I scared them because I was a shooter. I enjoyed taking my gun to the range and testing myself. I shot some matches with the local shooting club and I really enjoyed it. Because these were supposed to be my friends, I shared my excitement over my pastime.

It was not appreciated.

When I was told I was making people uncomfortable with my beloved topic, I stopped bringing it up. I wouldn’t talk about guns or anything of the sort unless someone else brought it up first. I figured that at that point, it was fair game.

Since that day, I’ve reconnected with most of that group, and it seems that most liked me, but a handful of folks didn’t. I made them uncomfortable.

To revisit the metaphor, I reminded them far too much of the wolf.

But that is one reason why we need more citizen warriors, my own term for those private citizens not engaged in the trade of protecting their fellow citizens. We need more of them as a form of social exposure therapy for those so terrified of every shadow.

Yet, if we can expand the number of citizen warriors to the point where everyone knows these people, where there’s one in every place of employment (if not several dozen), one in every church, one in every restaurant or movie theater.

We need them out there and we need them to be vocal. We need them to acknowledge that yes, they have the training and tools to do very bad things, but they are proud of their society and have no interest in acting against society’s laws. Instead, they will lay down their lives for their fellow man if need be.

A proliferation of these men and women–there is zero reason in this day and age that it simply has to be men–will make it harder to pretend that the citizen warrior is some kind of fringe group.

Unfortunately, such a thing will be difficult to do.

For better or worse, the stigmatization of warriors was long ago. It started with parents being told that games like “war” and “cops and robbers” wasn’t fitting for children. They were encouraged to engage in other forms of play. They were told that such things weren’t appropriate and that such play would invariably lead to more violence on our streets.

Some parents listened. Some didn’t.

However, schools carried the effort on. Whereas a schoolyard fight might have landed the kids some mild punishment in times gone by, today it is the cause of dreadful concern. Meanwhile, no effort is made to determine who initiated the fight or why it took place. Both parties are punished the same, thereby teaching that meekness is the only appropriate response to naked aggression.

Children’s entertainment has been constantly under assault by busybody parents who fear little Jimmy seeing a gun on television might damage his precious psyche and thus, such think should be purged from all entertainment.

In other words, a series of efforts through the year have successfully wussified the American public.

Through it all, though, there have always been the rebels. Those are the people who feel compelled to embrace the nature of the warrior no matter what. They can’t help themselves. They simply feel a compulsion to learn and train to protect their fellow man.

Many gravitate toward the military or law enforcement. However, sometimes they succumb to pressure to do other things for whatever reason. Maybe family obligations present themselves. Maybe an old injury makes pursuing a warrior’s vocation an impossibility. Who knows.

Still others did their time and came home from military service. The reasons are plentiful, but often they had nothing to do with needing an end to putting it all on the line for someone else. That is rarely given as a cause.

Now, these people are among us. They’re like a divine insurance policy against evil.

The problem is, these people are often few and far between. We need more of them. We need to undo the damage of decades of busybody mothers terrified that little Jimmy might see something unpleasant. We need to undo decades of parents terrified that violent play leads to actual violence, despite the legions who engaged in such play and have never harmed a soul.

We need to undo it all.

In the process, we need more citizen warriors so they can be everywhere they need to be. They can be on the New York subway car. They can be on the airplane. They can be in the movie theater or office building. They can be there the very moment they’re needed.

Maybe it’s a mass shooter, some jackass who thinks he needs to take vengeance for some imagined slight. Maybe it’s a terrorist who thinks his 72 virgins await. Maybe it’s some loser who thinks this will make some kind of a point.

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is the moment that evil rears its head, someone is there to meet it and put an end to it. Permanently, if needed.

The only way that happens is if the warriors are there when they’re needed, and for that, we need more of them.

Honor is an important thing. However, honor doesn’t strictly depend on what you do. It’s also about how others view you. Being honorable is hard, and people want to be acknowledged as honorable. Unfortunately, some other people will want to tear you down as well.

Photo courtesy of Fondo Antiguo de la Biblioteca

In days gone by, dueling was how this was dealt with. Two men would draw swords and go after one another. Still later, it was pistols at 20 paces. Regardless of the tool, there was a definite risk of life which made it costly to be insulting.

Then, we became more “civilized” and dueling was banned. That didn’t end the practice but pushed it underground. Further, it gave the dishonorable sort an out. After all, now all they had to do was claim to be law abiding citizens.

For a while, boxing took the place of dueling. Two men would put aside their swords or pistols according to the law, and hopped into the ring to settle their disputes. In many schools, even in relatively recent times, the gym coach would put gloves and headgear on two students having issues and let them duke it out.